PackBot robots search the World Trade Center site

Before PackBot

iRobot's own company history puts two robots ahead of PackBot: Genghis, built in 1991, and Ariel, built in 1996 ^[1]. The history also names the project that led to PackBot directly: it says a 1998 DARPA contract to develop tactical mobile robots was the precursor to PackBot ^[1]. DARPA is the US defense research agency, and a tactical mobile robot is, in plain terms, a machine that moves through a site and does a job where sending a person would be slow, difficult or dangerous. That description matters here, because the first use of PackBot that the company records was neither a laboratory demonstration nor a test range.

September 2001

According to iRobot's official history, PackBot conducted search operations at the World Trade Center after the September 11 attacks in 2001 ^[1]. The site of a large structural collapse is one of the hardest environments a robot can be asked to work in. The ground is a mixture of steel, concrete and debris that can shift without warning; the air carries dust; and the voids where a survivor might be found are often too small for a person in protective gear to enter. A machine that can be driven or lowered into those spaces, carrying sensors and a camera, lets responders look inside without adding more people to the risk. That is the case for sending robots into a disaster scene, and the World Trade Center search is an early instance of the case being acted on.

Into military service

Military interest followed quickly. iRobot's history says the US military deployed PackBot for the first time in 2002 ^[1], the year after the search operations. Two years later the company won a contract in 2004 to develop a Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle for the US Army's Future Combat Systems programme ^[1]. Laid out in order — a research contract in 1998, search work at a disaster site in 2001, a first military deployment in 2002, a larger development contract in 2004 — the sequence is a familiar one for field robotics: a research programme pays for a first version, a real emergency puts it to work, and procurement follows.

The same company, two kinds of customer

PackBot was not iRobot's only line of work. Announcing Roomba in 2002, the company said it had built numerous products over the previous 12 years for the US military, law enforcement, energy, industrial cleaning and toy industries ^[2]. The same announcement described a new consumer robotics division that applied the company's expertise in artificial intelligence technology and cost effective manufacturing to consumer appliances ^[2]. Read together, the two documents make a simple point: the capabilities the company lists for its consumer arm — artificial intelligence technology and cost effective manufacturing — are also what decides whether a field robot is practical to build and to keep working.

What the episode shows

The PackBot search operations are worth remembering because they show what such machines had become for. Genghis and Ariel appear in the company chronology as projects; PackBot was a machine given a task at a real emergency site ^[1], and within a year it was deployed by the US military ^[1]. Going from a prototype to a working deployment is hard for any piece of hardware, and going from a disaster site to a procurement programme is another step again; here both happened in a short span. In the same period the company was taking the same engineering skills into homes ^[2], so two lines of work — the one that goes where people cannot, and the one sold as a household appliance — grew side by side.